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"The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious structures into an "event" that triggers, by virtue of a "cut," an expected/unexpected resolution. Using examples from mainstream comedy, The Comic Event progresses from the smallest comic moment--jokes, bits--to the more complex--caricatures, sketches, sit-coms, parody films, and stand-up routines. Judith Roof builds on side comments from Henri Bergson's short treatise "Laughter," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various observations from Aristotle to establish comedy as a complex, multifaceted practice. In seeing comedy as a gathering event that resolves with a "cut," Roof characterizes comedy not only by a predictable unpredictability occasioned by a sudden expected/unexpected insight, but also by repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and an ourobouric return to a previous cut. This theory of comedy offers a way to understand the operation of a broad array of distinct comic occasions and aspects of performance in multiple contexts"-- "A pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation" -- "At first mere improvisation" -- Reverberations : the joke of the joke -- Repetition and the exquisite seriesness of series -- "Play it again, Sheldon" : nothing in comedy ever only happens once -- The comic uncanny, or, The character of caricature -- Breaking stacks and cutting layers : the self-conscious comedy of comedy -- Doubling down on the mise en abyme : the comic contexts of comedy -- Ouroboros-Epanalepsis : "a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation" -- Ouroborobooboros, or, when parody takes itself on -- The long and winding road -- One more time : the aristocratic apparatus -- And....the time--ing is right : the politics of delay
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